The Gillard government is opening the way for Tony Abbott to stroll to power. The compounding scandals and stench merely confirm the impossibility that Julia Gillard can somehow persuade the electorate to reconsider its low opinion of her and her government.

The collapse of Labor purpose, Labor leadership and the Labor vote at the state and federal levels opens an extraordinary opportunity for Abbott to set up the Liberals for many years in power. But the Abbott opposition is not ready for power.

Abbott is following the precedents of state Liberal oppositions. Like Ted Baillieu in Victoria and Barry O'Farrell in NSW, he has successfully made the government the big target while making himself a "small target".

This is about winning power by amplifying the faults of the government rather than the virtues of the opposition. It's about stoking anger at the incumbent rather than igniting hope in the alternative government.

And it works. Anger is the original political emotion. As the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk points out: "At the beginning of the first sentence of the European tradition, in the first verse of The Iliad, the word 'rage' occurs." Homer was writing of the rage of the warrior hero Achilles.

As Australia's own raging warrior hero, Abbott has successfully led the prosecution of Gillard while making himself a small target. A "small target" is a party that offers the voter a bare minimum - a minimal agenda, a minimal set of policies, and as little detail as possible.

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Gillard may be a plodding, transactional Prime Minister without a skerrick of vision and demonstrating serial political misjudgment, but that does not make Abbott a good leader.

The former Liberal premier of Victoria, Jeff Kennett, put it this way: "If you ask Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott where they want Australia to be in 2050, I think they will look back at you with blank expressions. And most of the premiers are in the same category."

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Abbott has a vision but it's so far limited to negating Gillard, not offering a compelling alternative, or even a credible one. That's why the Coalition's primary vote is so high while Abbott's personal approval rating is low.

The primary vote registers the electorate's verdict against Gillard. The personal approval is a measure of the electorate's opinion of Abbott.

The latest Nielsen poll for the Herald showed the Coalition's primary vote soaring at 47 per cent, against dismal Labor's 27. But Abbott's approval rating was minus 17 per cent. This is only slightly better than Gillard's minus 23. These figures rank them both as unpopular leaders.

Gillard is unambiguously losing; Abbott's victory is highly ambiguous. A raging warrior, like a prosecutor, is there to demolish, not to build.

The "small target" approach is a clever way to win power for an opposition, and appalling preparation for it to become a government.

Look at Abbott's ''small-target'' state Liberal forerunners, Baillieu and O'Farrell. Both have proved to be disappointments in only a year or so.

They show us that it is very easy to waste the opportunity, to take power without plans, to have a majority without a mandate. O'Farrell took office promising to be the "infrastructure premier". Hallelujah, thought the long-suffering people of NSW.

Yet the distinguishing feature of his infrastructure agenda so far is his flat refusal to countenance building a second airport. He now stands with the owners of the Sydney Airport monopoly, Macquarie Group, in being the only people in the country who argue that it's unnecessary. The federal government is prepared to support a second airport, but the Premier will not.

O'Farrell's real problem is that he didn't campaign on the idea, so feels unable to act on it - a premier with a majority but no mandate. He is a timid leader whose ambition is not to achieve anything but to offend no one. He wanted to be a small target. The result is that his small target is now Sydney's small future.

Worse, as Sydney is the country's principal entrepot, it is a national problem. The cost will be the strangulation of growth and opportunity for many years.

More urgently, Sydney is suffering from a serious problem of violent crime with daily shootings. O'Farrell tells us, in his words, that we have a "serious bikie gang war" going on.

It has been building for months, while the O'Farrell government was principally concerned with breaking the will of the police union so that it could cut the injury payments to police officers hurt in the line of duty.

What is O'Farrell doing? Apart from damaging police morale by cutting their injury compensation entitlements, he is doing nothing more than posturing.

He has declared a ban on bikie gang members wearing their colours in a number of bars. What is he campaigning against here? Fashion crimes? And he is denouncing a judge for granting bail to a bikie accused of torching an empty police van. This fulmination merely exposes his own inaction.

O'Farrell did have a more serious idea. He asked Gillard to look at national steps to crack down on organised crime gangs and gun crime. This is an excellent idea; state borders are porous to gangs and guns. Gillard, to her credit, embraced the proposal. She has tried to follow through with the federal-state level meetings that would be the venue for action.

Unaccountably, O'Farrell repeatedly has failed to take up the opportunities given him to advance the matter, most recently when he was at the table for the Council of Australian Governments meeting.

In short, O'Farrell's policy response has been risible. His small-target approach to power has allowed criminals lots of targets. The situation in Victoria is different but the theme is the same. A new Liberal government takes power with a small-target strategy, and almost immediately disappoints the voters with its poor agenda and inaction on critical problems.

The risk is that an Abbott government will let down Australia just as O'Farrell is letting down NSW and Baillieu Victoria. He still has time to fix this.

Indeed, he has signalled that he will. In a speech this year he said that the Australian people were optimists looking for a "pragmatic problem-solving government". He promised to announce the ideas and the policies that would provide just that. But he is having trouble moving from negative to positive.

Just yesterday, he gave a speech to the Institute of Public Affairs that began by celebrating Australia's fine history of positive contributions to world affairs. "We count for something in the wider world and should use our reach and sway to promote Australia's true interests and best values," Abbott said.

It's an interesting theme that Abbott might have developed to showcase his ideas. But the speech quickly reverted to familiar form as he denounced Labor. The speech's concluding thought: "We are a great country and a great people let down by a bad government but that will pass. Whether it's this year or next year, we will soon enough have the chance to pass judgment on the current government. Australians know that it's possible to end the waste, to repay the debt and to stop the boats because it's been done before."

Serious members of Abbott's team are deeply worried. They are getting closer to power, but no closer to being a serious, credible alternative government. "We are all worried that we will win a huge majority with a mandate for nothing," says a frontbench Liberal. "We'll have a mandate to repeal the carbon tax and the mining tax and a couple of lesser things, and then what? Tony is focused on the John Hewson experience. But we could put just about anything in our platform and still win the election."

Abbott was working as a press secretary to Hewson when the former economics professor produced his Fightback manifesto, a detailed set of economic reform proposals that he planned to carry into government at the 1993 election.

Abbott's finance spokesman, Andrew Robb, was the Liberal campaign director during the same experience. Paul Keating waged a successful fear campaign against the plan; Hewson lost the "unlosable election" against an unpopular prime minister. It was a bitter moment for the Liberals.

But it's entirely possible to offer a positive agenda without producing a detailed manifesto of radical policies at biblical length, as Hewson did.

Kennett, who was unpopular for his decisive repairs to Victoria but is now recognised as a first-rate premier, argues that it's not only necessary but that Australians are craving something more than rage and small targets.

"If you look at the election results in NSW and more recently in Queensland, the public is crying out for leadership. It's why agenda setting is so important. If Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott could articulate a vision, I think the public would buy into it. Oppositions ought to offer a real policy alternative in the year heading to an election."

The final year is fast approaching. Abbott still has time and opportunity to offer himself as something other than not Gillard.